The new news 24 thread

[lesapandre]

Another fleamarket find - (I did not buy this one there is a limit to the crap I can accommodate) - but interesting historically as one of the (probably many) small oil companies supplying the UK vehicle market at one time.

A quick look on t'web threw up an old ad. Thought the area remains industrial company appears long gone. 

[Coprolalia]

32 minutes ago, Coprolalia said:

Currently on annual leave. Had a nice day planned doing DIY and other bits.

Got a call from my wife as she entered the station to go to work... "My wheel is pointing the wrong way".

 

 

Ruh roh

[SiC]

Just come back from Iceland. Not as cold as I expected - apparently they're getting a warmer winter at the moment and it's been sitting above freezing a lot. 

Very expensive. For example this bland tasting supermarket sandwich was £7.60

But I still ate a bit too much.

Saw some incredible scenery.

The peak was seeing the Northern Lights. At first it was really weak - only visible through a phone on long exposure. Pretty much gave up as the conditions weren't good. As the bus tour driver saying that it is just unfortunate and down to luck, he paused and told us to "all get off the bus NOW". 

Sky absolutely lit up for a good 5 minutes. Photos don't really do it justice. I always thought the dancing aurora was from time lapse trickery. However it really does dance in front of your eyes in realtime.

Even managed a quick selfie. My startled expression is the concentration trying to keep the phone still for 3 seconds as the night mode capture counted down. Not a type of photo you get time to mess up and redo!

Anyway vehicular reports. 

Firstly one of the tour buses had a great novel repair* going on. 

There wasn't too much old stuff about. Not actually that much salt and grit about but I guess when you're in the middle of nowhere, you really want something reliable. Albeit doesn't explain the amount of JLR products I saw about.

There was a lot of tour specific vehicles about that were jacked up busses and vans.

 

The oldest vehicle was this inside the airport as a display.

The rest were mostly jacked up normal vehicles. This Jimny is kinda cute 

Not as much Yank stuff about - I guess fuel is too expensive. But the odd bits. These are the older Yank stuff I saw out and about.

Probably the only G-Wagon now that actually gets used for it's intended purposes.

Loads of modern Land Cruiser. This was the only old one I saw.

 

Was a great trip, albeit I'm knackered and need another holiday to rest. My credit card is also very much feeling the pain.

[lesapandre]

BEIKON 😂 and that coach 😂

[SiC]

Oh and yes, there is an Iceland in Iceland.

[wuvvum]

That coach body grafted onto the 8x8 truck chassis is so shit it's brilliant!

[wuvvum]

Just spoken to the insurance re the Ampera.  They've had the engineer's report back and they've made an offer - it's on the low side but not £pisstake as I was expecting.  The offer involving me keeping the car is more attractive as they've valued the salvage at £855, which given that it's Cat N makes it well worth repairing with secondhand bits.

Now all I need is for the accident management company to tell me where they've put the car!

[plasticvandan]

Not car related,but some will appreciate,due to a sudden strong bout of the tisms,childhood nostalgia and the need for such a thing to actually use,I've just finished lightly refurbishing my recently acquired 1970 Hoover Junior Dirtsearcher (with light) I consider this to be the Morris Minor of vaccum cleaners..in fact I think the Minor and the Junior are probably two of the best things Britain ever made😅

[BorniteIdentity]

13 minutes ago, plasticvandan said:

Not car related,but some will appreciate,due to a sudden strong bout of the tisms,childhood nostalgia and the need for such a thing to actually use,I've just finished lightly refurbishing my recently acquired 1970 Hoover Junior Dirtsearcher (with light) I consider this to be the Morris Minor of vaccum cleaners..in fact I think the Minor and the Junior are probably two of the best things Britain ever made😅

What a lovely old thing. I know it’ll be terrible (and, deep down, you’d probably privately agree) but just how terrible is it? My memory of these things is they generate a lot of heat and not a lot of light. All noise and no suck. 

So?! Tell me it’s shit so I don’t get one… 

[plasticvandan]

25 minutes ago, BorniteIdentity said:

What a lovely old thing. I know it’ll be terrible (and, deep down, you’d probably privately agree) but just how terrible is it? My memory of these things is they generate a lot of heat and not a lot of light. All noise and no suck. 

So?! Tell me it’s shit so I don’t get one… 

That the big secret,they are,for carpet at least,pretty amazing,and only 250w. The brush roller has beater bars as well,so it "beats as it sweeps as it cleans" as the old adverts used to say. For normal carpet cleaning they more than hold their own with modern machines,but are designed to be repaired,and extremely reliable.a 21st century twist is modding modern hypo alergenic fleece bags from modern cleaners to go on which improves  air flow and cleanliness a lot.They were in production in various guises from the mid 30s to the late 80s, Hoover even paid Currys to scrap any that were brought in as part of a get a discount off a new cleaner if you bring your old one,as people just had them repaired rather than buy new. Plenty of info on YouTube,Inc from Mr Beko of course.

Personally it's memories of my grandparents having one identical for upstairs,and a two tone brown one for down stairs,and my dad always having them as well. Interestingly he has just got a Senior (juniors big brother) for his house,having finally had enough of the modern crap his partner kept buying breaking.

[stuboy]

9 hours ago, SiC said:

much want

[wuvvum]

22 hours ago, wuvvum said:

Now all I need is for the accident management company to tell me where they've put the car!

Just heard back from the accident management company.  According to them, I have the car.

Epic.

[wuvvum]

The garage doesn't know either. 🤪

[Spottedlaurel]

Dare I suggest it got taken away with a load of other write-offs to avoid storage costs?

[wuvvum]

The garage still has it.  Phew.  They just hadn't updated the record properly.

[wuvvum]

Right then.

Now that I know where the car is, I've emailed the third party insurer to say I'm accepting their offer with the salvage deducted.

The garage said that they would need an email from the insurer confirming that they can release the car to me, which is fair enough.  @JJ0063, as our resident motor claims expert - is that something the insurer would send as a matter of course, or will I need to bug them to do it?

[JJ0063]

12 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

Right then.

Now that I know where the car is, I've emailed the third party insurer to say I'm accepting their offer with the salvage deducted.

The garage said that they would need an email from the insurer confirming that they can release the car to me, which is fair enough.  @JJ0063, as our resident motor claims expert - is that something the insurer would send as a matter of course, or will I need to bug them to do it?

I hope you declined the first offer? They’ll usually send one improved/final offer before saying that’s all they’ll do.

Re the notification of release, I’ll be honest it’s not my area as I’m based in new business,  I’d pressure them although I imagine they’ll be relatively quick on it as they may end up incurring storage charges if not. Depends on the arrangement they have I suppose! Knowing how useless some can be, I’d definitely bug them about it. 

[JakeT]

On 26/02/2025 at 11:54, SiC said:

Just come back from Iceland. Not as cold as I expected - apparently they're getting a warmer winter at the moment and it's been sitting above freezing a lot. 

Was a great trip, albeit I'm knackered and need another holiday to rest. My credit card is also very much feeling the pain.

Gosh, funny you should say about the cost. My Mrs booked us a surprise trip a couple of years ago for my birthday, in the middle of December. We were lucky and got lots of cold. Example…

But the cost of stuff was high. An example being, my suitcase got stuck locked shut. I mean nothing would unlock it. After resorting to destructive methods to get it open, I needed a new bag. Finding a samsonite shop was proving difficult, so I looked for the next next thing. A sports shop, an Icelandic company called 66° north. They had a nice little duffel bag which I bought. Not caring about the exchange rate I didn’t check until I saw on the bank statement it was £110…

The worst bit being their stuff is great, and Ive bought a couple of jackets. On sale mind, else I’d need to sell a kidney.

 

Gorgeous country though, and I’d like to go back again.

[wuvvum]

2 minutes ago, JJ0063 said:

I hope you declined the first offer? They’ll usually send one improved/final offer before saying that’s all they’ll do.

Nope.  Their first offer was significantly better than I was expecting and to be honest I'm fed up with the whole bloody thing now - I'd rather get the whole thing finalised than drag it out for the sake of maybe a couple of hundred quid more.  As it is I should be able to repair the car using secondhand bits from a scrappy and still end up with a 4-figure sum in my pocket, that's good enough for me.

[comfortablynumb]

19 hours ago, plasticvandan said:

Not car related,but some will appreciate,due to a sudden strong bout of the tisms,childhood nostalgia and the need for such a thing to actually use,I've just finished lightly refurbishing my recently acquired 1970 Hoover Junior Dirtsearcher (with light) I consider this to be the Morris Minor of vaccum cleaners..in fact I think the Minor and the Junior are probably two of the best things Britain ever made😅

Paging @beko1987 🤣

[SiC]

1 hour ago, wuvvum said:

Nope.  Their first offer was significantly better than I was expecting and to be honest I'm fed up with the whole bloody thing now - I'd rather get the whole thing finalised than drag it out for the sake of maybe a couple of hundred quid more.  As it is I should be able to repair the car using secondhand bits from a scrappy and still end up with a 4-figure sum in my pocket, that's good enough for me.

When my civic was written off, I was told the salvage cost is related to the car value cost. Above a certain value (£2500 iirc) the percentage of value to make salvage jumped up. So the claims handler said I might as well take a lower value to make the total money back effectively more. 

Last year I got a letter from my insurer from back then with a cheque. Apparently their internal audit reckoned they underpaid me and this cheque was the difference plus 7 years interest. I seem to remember I took £2500 value and paid £250 or something like that as salvage. 

My civic was written off in similar circumstances. Came back with no rear bumper and all the rear boot wiring taken out. I put a new crash beam on (old took most of the force) and replaced a black plastic exhaust surround trim to make it good to go again. Plastic bumper was fine as bendy flexible plastic didn't really show much in the way of marks - except the four rings of the Audi grille that hit me from behind... They pulled everything off to discover the boot floor had a dent in. Obviously needed to be back pre-accident and a 10yr old car wasn't worth doing bodywork on. So they sent it back to me exactly how they left it - of course no point them spending time+money putting it back together again.

My insurer said they'd only cover it third party until I got a fresh MOT on it. Which I did and I called them up to tell them it was fresh, they then updated their records to make it fully comp again. 

[wuvvum]

Mine is Cat N so hopefully no new MOT required.  Apparently they've only removed the rear bumper, but as with you they've not put it back together as the car was a total loss - and my bumper was quite damaged anyway.

Not sure how to get it home - obviously it's going to need a new number plate (it'd need one anyway as that was damaged in the crash) and in theory if I'm driving it home in daylight I should get away with no rear fog or number plate lights for the 15-mile drive home, so I might get away with going down there with a number plate and sticky pads, bunging the plate on and driving it home, but I don't know what it looks like behind the bumper and if there's going to be sharp edges, wiring hanging down etc. so I might need to get it transported.  Which if the insurer provides the notification of release before the Rover runs out of MOT, I can do myself with a hired trailer.  Otherwise I'll have to pay someone.

[SiC]

10 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

Mine is Cat N so hopefully no new MOT required.  Apparently they've only removed the rear bumper, but as with you they've not put it back together as the car was a total loss - and my bumper was quite damaged anyway.

Not sure how to get it home - obviously it's going to need a new number plate (it'd need one anyway as that was damaged in the crash) and in theory if I'm driving it home in daylight I should get away with no rear fog or number plate lights for the 15-mile drive home, so I might get away with going down there with a number plate and sticky pads, bunging the plate on and driving it home, but I don't know what it looks like behind the bumper and if there's going to be sharp edges, wiring hanging down etc. so I might need to get it transported.  Which if the insurer provides the notification of release before the Rover runs out of MOT, I can do myself with a hired trailer.  Otherwise I'll have to pay someone.

Mine was only a Cat N too from memory. It definitely wasn't on the V5 too from memory and I think only Cat S have that on there?

They transported it back to me onto my drive FOC. This was Direct Line from memory. Maybe quicker and thus cheaper for them than taking yard space?

[wuvvum]

The garage the car is with don't have their own transporter.  The transport to the garage was arranged by the accident management company, but I'm not letting them anywhere near the car again!  Going on their recent performance it'd probably end up at Copart.

[HMC]

Made the most of the fine weather today to air out the interior of the farina

Its generally pretty watertight but the front screen leaks a bit. Time for some captain tolleys to seal it.

[beko1987]

2 hours ago, comfortablynumb said:

Paging @beko1987 🤣

I've already got a small envelope of parts on my desk to get a label on and sent over 😂

Not many other places to go when you just need 2 specific screws and some belts 😂👌 

[wuvvum]

Off on a post work collection mission (not the Ampera!).

Folding bicycle deployed. 

[wuvvum]

And home.

[hairnet]

omg

kiltox of the east?

[wuvvum]

Nah, he won't touch one of these again - couldn't sell the one he had.

(Although mine was cheaper.  And is a nicer colour.  Remains to be seen whether the battery is in better condition though.)